Archive/File: people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-073-05
Last-Modified: 1999/06/08
Dr. Servatius: Yes, but has the Prosecutor not mentioned
the number of comments, two hundred and more, which are in
the typewritten records of the first tapes? There are
places there where there are no comments, and there are
other places where comments exist. In the additional
collection, File 17, a more detailed explanation is given.
I have already explained how it happened that the later
records contain more detailed comments; I have explained
that the lack of confidence engendered in the Accused's mind
led to suspicions, and that these suspicions led to a
detailed contract between the two, according to which the
documents could only be published and utilized if the full
signature of the Accused appeared on them.
There are also other aspects, from which one can realize the
special, journalistic, interest which that journalist had in
this whole episode. For example, it is known - and it can
be proved - that already before the Accused's arrest, he
offered this material to a certain newspaper, but without
revealing the name of the person concerned. That same
newspaper declined, since it was not interested in anonymous
stories, without the name of the central figure who could be
mentioned, for otherwise the matter would have become known,
and to the Accused as well.
I also have to point out that, only eight days after
Eichmann's arrest, the material was already handed to the
weekly Life with rights of adaptation and use for its
purposes. It is a pity that I should have been handed the
material only now, at such a late stage. As far as I know,
this material has been in the State of Israel for some time;
to the best of my knowledge, it was transferred by Sassen to
a representative of Yediot Hadashot.* {*German-language
newspaper published in Israel}
To sum up, I would ask that the application to admit the
document be rejected, and that the best available evidence
be brought, namely the witnesses Sassen and Fritsch, whose
addresses I am prepared to supply to the Court.
Attorney General: Perhaps I may be permitted to make a brief
comment. I am submitting this material, not so much for the
purpose of comparing its contents, as to compare its style.
If the contents of Sassen's transcript had been identical
with what the Accused told Bureau 06, I would not have
troubled the Court for so many hours in this matter, because
then it would have been superfluous. But I want to show the
similarity of the style which identifies the person by whom
the statement was made.
And one final remark: The material in question was, at the
time when it was recorded and discovered, secret material;
it was within the special knowledge of the Accused and a
very limited number of other people. He was certainly
interested in concealing it.
Presiding Judge: Mr. Hausner, this is really a new argument.
Naturally, what you are saying is in response to the
objection by the other party. That is true. But now I have
to allow Dr. Servatius to reply.
Attorney General: Therefore I shall content myself with this
one sentence.
Presiding Judge: [After Dr. Servatius rises to make his
point.] Now we have really to submit to both sides.
Dr. Servatius: Your Honour, the Presiding Judge, only a few
words. On the facts that the Accused recorded remarks on to
a tape - as he did here as well with the Prosecution - of
his own free will, remarks which - if I express myself
cautiously - are of an unpleasant nature - on all this there
is no dispute. We are only in conflict on the section that
was made, on the composition of the journalistic story.
Presiding Judge: We shall consider this and give our
decision. Will we be able to use the time left before the
recess? We have about another quarter of an hour.
Attorney General: Yes, Your Honour.
Presiding Judge: Do you have another testimony?
Attorney General: Yes. I have a further request for a
certain directive which I shall ask from the Court,
concerning a particular chapter which has not yet been
elucidated in evidence. Since the Court has made its
comments on a number of matters, I do not want to call the
witness before receiving a directive from the Court in this
matter. I disregard the tens - possibly hundreds - of
applications from people wishing to testify, each one about
the fate of his own community.
Presiding Judge: You are not the only one to receive such
applications; they reach the Court, which, of course, is not
the right address.
Attorney General: I have received hundreds, Your Honour.
Presiding Judge: I have no doubt of that.
Attorney General: But, as I said in the opening stages, we
can only follow the searchlight method and draw the Court's
attention to descriptions which, in our view are typical,
and, on the strength of them, we shall ask the Court to draw
similar conclusions concerning other places and events.
But there is one aspect which has not yet been described at
all. This is the flight of the Jews - upon the liquidation
of the ghettos and the extermination operations - to the
forests, their organization into family camps, their escape
from the fury of the persecutor, their afflictions in the
forest, their pursuit by the Germans there, their suffering
from disease, from starvation, the protection given to them
by the partisans, their organization into partisan units;
according to my information, there were about twenty
thousand such Jews. There were also about twenty thousand
partisans.
I know that it is not the Court's wish that we attempt to
depict the Holocaust fully, for the Court desires - and,
with all due respect, rightly so - to confine the matters
brought before it only to the indictment against the
Accused. But, in our view, this also relates to the
Accused. They fled from these hardships which the Accused
brought upon them - they were forced to hide, and everything
they underwent came from the Accused, if not directly, at
least indirectly. The evidence should be exceedingly brief,
from one of the persons who saw the camps, went along with
them, accompanied them.
Presiding Judge: One of the camps of the partisans?
Attorney General: One of the people who fled to the forest
after the revolt in the Nesvizh Ghetto, saw the family
camps, joined a partisan unit, accompanied, for a period of
two months, such a trek of Jewish families concealing
themselves in the forest of Polesye and their experiences
there. According to the number of questions that I want to
put to this witness, Mr. Shalom Cholawski, of Kibbutz Ein
Hashofet, this should not last more than twenty to thirty
minutes. I would urge the Court to allow me to complete the
picture.
Following this, I have a number of documents about the
"Reinhardt Aktion" (the Reinhardt Operation). After that,
there will be the evidence of Mr. Aharon Hoter-Yishai about
the Jewish Brigade's encounter with the camps, and with
that, I shall conclude.
Presiding Judge: Dr. Servatius, what do you wish to say
regarding this application - a description of the chapter
concerning the partisans?
Dr. Servatius: Your Honour, the Presiding Judge, I should
like to go into this application and consider whether it is
not admissible, and whether it would not be redundant. So
far, I have refrained, and have not expressed objections to
the question of lack of relevancy, for sometimes those are,
nevertheless, matters important for the background; but it
seems to me that now we are going too far. I, too, have
been the recipient of very many applications and, amongst
them, requests on the part of Jews to appear and to cast
light on one or other aspect of the story. I examined every
single application with all due seriousness, in order to see
whether there was something there for the Accused's defence,
and, thereafter, I have turned down all these approaches
made so far. I would, therefore, be grateful to the Court
if it should decide to set a limit and not to hear this
evidence.
Presiding Judge: We shall deal with this matter as well
during the recess. But let us complete the question of
these documents, the "Reinhardt Aktion," and will that be
the last of the documents?
Attorney General: We still have various odds and ends.
First, I have to inform the Court that we approached the
Israeli embassy in Warsaw and asked them to examine the
document which the witness Bahir said he had identified.
Presiding Judge: The photograph.
Attorney General: The embassy did not find a photograph
which could have been such as that which Mr. Bahir could
have identified. They searched in the files of the Polish
Government Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes -
they did not find a photograph in which a man appeared in
Himmler's entourage who, in their opinion, bore a
resemblance to Eichmann.
I also applied, through our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to
the Swedish Government - following an observation made by
His Honour, Judge Halevi: - and perhaps, after the recess, I
could read the cable received from Stockholm. This we could
possibly do after the recess, with the Court's permission.
I want to say at the outset, Your Honour, I shall ask the
Court also at the end of today's Session not to oblige me to
say that that is all, and that my story ends there. We want
to make a thorough survey of our library of documents, and
if we have forgotten something - and we are talking only of
documents, not of witnesses - to be able to submit it when
the sessions resume. We are certainly not talking of a
large quantity. But if something of value has been
overlooked, we should not like the door to be closed to us.
Presiding Judge: We shall see about that at the end of the
day, when we get there.
Attorney General: First of all, regarding document No. 4 -
we have discussed this with Defence Counsel. The Court will
remember that this is the account of Auschwitz by the two
young men who escaped. We explained that, in our view,
there is no discrepancy in the numbers, but, nevertheless,
the Defence does not agree to the submission of the
document. I believe that we explained the matter to their
satisfaction as well and, therefore, I shall do what I
mentioned at the previous session, in reply to His Honour,
Judge Halevi. I shall ask one of the two who escaped, who
is in London, to let me have an affidavit, and I shall then
submit the affidavit to the Court, together with the
document, and the Court will decide as it thinks fit, at the
proper time. I thought that the Defence would withdraw its
objection after my explanation, but it did not turn out that
way.
Now, with regard to the "Reinhardt Aktion." What was this
Reinhardt Operation? This is explained in the affidavit of
Oswald Pohl, our document No. 1106. I ask the Court to
accept this document in evidence. Pohl is no longer alive.
Presiding Judge: Dr. Servatius, what do you have to say?
Dr. Servatius: I have no formal objection.
Presiding Judge
Decision No. 77
We admit the affidavit of Pohl in evidence. Defence Counsel
has no objection.
This document will be marked T/1384.
Attorney General: Pohl explains that this was an operation
which had two aspects. There was an economic side to the
operation: to plunder property and to ensure that the booty
from the concentration camps be deposited in the Reichsbank.
He says that he communicated with Pohl in regard to the
delivery, and that the gold, jewellery and foreign currency
were sent to the Reichsbank to the credit of the German
Reich.
The other side of the coin in the Reinhardt Operation was
the concentration of the Jews into extermination camps. And
now, here is a number of reports on this operation.
Our document No. 187 is a secret report on the exploitation
of the property of the Jews who were evacuated and deported.
For purposes of secrecy, it was decided that Jewish property
would henceforth be described as property that had been
stolen or plundered or robbed - thus the property of the
deported Jews was to be marked. And now, with great
thoroughness, there are instructions what to do with the
property, what to do with the sums of cash money - that is
to go to the Reichsbank; what to do with the foreign
currency. The watches are to go to the SS department for
special workshops; men's underwear is to go to the
Volksdeutsche outside the Reich; women's clothes are to go
to the Volksdeutsche; silk underwear to the Ministry of the
Economy; bed linen to the Mittelstelle of the Volksdeutsche
- that is, some intermediary institution for equipping these
persons with household requirements; sheets and so forth -
to the front line; spectacles and lenses - to the Ministry
of Health; valuable furs - these the SS wanted for
themselves.
Instructions were given for fixing the selling price of the
plundered property to its purchasers, by giving sample
prices as laid down by law. But before the property, and
particularly the clothing, were handed to those robbing
them, the Jewish badge had to be removed from them.
Furthermore, all the articles had to be carefully examined,
in order to discover valuables concealed and sewn into them.
Presiding Judge: This document will be marked T/1385.
Attorney General: The next document I wish to submit in this
matter is the declaration of the Accused's secretary at the
time, Hildegard Kunze. I do not know where she is, I do not
know whether she is alive or not. Therefore, if Defence
Counsel objects and insists that she be brought here, I
shall have to refrain from submitting the document, although
I would have wished to bring it to the Court's attention.
From the point of view of authentication, there is no
difficulty - it was authenticated at the International
Military Tribunal. But from another point of view, the
point of view of the principle which the Court has laid
down, there is likely to be a problem, and, hence, Defence
Counsel has to be heard. If he has an objection, I shall
not be able to submit the document. I do not know where
Miss Kunze is now, and for that purpose alone, I shall not
search for her.
Dr. Servatius: Your Honour, the Presiding Judge, I object
to the submission of this document. She was a very young
girl who testified after the War, and, apparently, she
confirmed what was placed before her. I would have to hear
her, in order to see what she would say now. The contents
of the document are quite meagre; one may assume that if she
were to appear here and testify, its contents would become
of even less value.

This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.

As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.